


between pause and play

by khattikeri



Series: director's cut [1]
Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, First Kiss, M/M, Missing Scene, Spoilers, yet another yearning in the hangar fic [finger guns] [distant sobbing]
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:48:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25663144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/khattikeri/pseuds/khattikeri
Summary: The wish that they could’ve been friends-- could’ve beennormal--lingers, burgeoning, burning bright in Ouma’s chest.I don’t want to die.
Relationships: Momota Kaito/Oma Kokichi
Series: director's cut [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1862407
Comments: 37
Kudos: 96





	between pause and play

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seizonsha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seizonsha/gifts).



> This one's for you, Ruri! Your angsty poetry has rubbed off on me, truly. I cried writing this.
> 
> But then again, I always cry when listening to Nightsky by Tracey Chattaway and thinking about Ouma, or Momota, or Chapter 5 Ouma and Momota, or Oumota in general. So for maximum effect, you should listen to the song while reading this. [Here's a link!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DSeZji2x-Y)

It has come to this.

Tears blur Ouma’s vision, but Momota’s hands brush them away, fading back to hold his face. Idly, Ouma wonders if anyone other than Death can have such a tender embrace.

(surrounding him entirely is a purple night sky. 

universal, all-encompassing, 

cloaking him in a kind lie.)

Momota flutters away from him, leaving his jacket behind, and Ouma feels colder as he lies down on the bed of his own making.

Only death by white could be crueler than this, but that’s okay. White, black, neutral blue-- Ouma will defy them all, will ruin them with his own game.

The ebb and flow of regret crashes over him in waves, a waterfall, fantastical and mourning. Even when he croaks at Momota to stop crying for him, to quit kneeling like a man at the altar and forgo wish-like prayer or confession, the other boy stubbornly grits his teeth and lets his tears fall onto Ouma’s face.

(the sky is metal and echoes like grief.

his heart is heavy with sin.)

The wish that they could’ve been friends-- could’ve been _normal--_ lingers, burgeoning, burning bright in Ouma’s chest.

(‘i don’t want to die.’)

_I don’t want to die._

“You don’t have to.”

Momota sounds like he’s having trouble convincing himself. Voice cracking, soft and quiet and defeatist. No insistence, no scrambling to find another way. It isn’t like him. 

Only then does Ouma put two and two together; recognize the words for what they are.

(a gentle lie.)

They really were the same.

More than anything, the two of them are different shades of the same purple, hiding and lying and crying and dying by the same masks of deceit. Testing fate, tricking the audience.

They are the Hanged Man and Strength, cards of the same deck.

(who could’ve known that they were really Fools all along?)

There should be some dramatic music right about here, Ouma thinks, some grand dialogue or sights or smells other than the tang of liquid copper festering in Momota’s lungs and mouth and in Ouma’s own arrow wounds.

Ouma’s hair is slick with sweat, his eyes are blurry and he wants to sleep, to sleep, to sleep, to be buried to rest already beneath this iron curtain away from the prying eyes of heartless entertainment-seekers-- but alas, his lungs still catch for air, prolonging his pain and comeuppance.

His bad luck, his little luck, his ‘Kokichi’, has caught up to him, he thinks with a wobbly smirk. His lips, bloodied red with the weight of cruel lies, find it difficult to stay up after so much disuse.

So it comes as almost a surprise when Momota stains his own lips against Ouma’s, envelopes them both in the blurry purple that isn’t quite truth nor lie, and Ouma, for once, feels safe again.

(it’s both the worst first kiss and the best last kiss

a sixteen-year-old boy like him could’ve gotten.)

Behind Ouma’s fluttered-shut lashes, starstruck and besotted as a half-corpse can be, he still sees the ghosts of the people he used, the few friends he threw away, and almost poetically, it’s only after thinking so that he tastes the blood pooling between his mouth and Momota’s.

_There’s an end I want to reach._

(‘there’s a reason i used these means.’)

_I wasn’t boring, was I?_

(‘this isn’t pointless, is it?’)

Regardless of the answer, Ouma has resigned himself. He’ll sleep alone on this cold bed, sleep forever unfound in this tight, loveless coffin.

Cruel and empty and muddled metallic gray, hopelessly ambiguous and, he assumes, stained reddish pink. Tinged with lies to the end. Befitting, even.

But befitting isn’t enough for his selfish, lying heart, and from the way the kiss deepens, closer and more desperate, even Momota Kaito seems to recognize that.

The carefully crafted castles built by Ouma’s lips come crumbling down; for all his effort it crashed awfully easy, he thinks-- but now he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care; there is no exisal, no huge book of plans and scripts, no grand finale Ouma wants, only this, _only this--_

He pulls apart with a choked gasp and grabs at Momota’s bloodstained, sweaty shirt, trembling and pale and pathetic. 

“I want to live,” Ouma sobs, tears dripping onto the night sky of Momota’s jacket, or maybe his bloody shirt, he doesn’t know; all that registers is that his hypocritical tears are falling, and whether by physical presence or by proxy, Momota is catching them all. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry…”

His fingernails dig into Momota’s shoulders, hands clenching the other’s forearm as if trying to steady himself, and the human touch still doesn’t feel close enough. 

Momota’s pain must be worse than his own, but even here, the other boy sucks up his dignity and facade at once, and returns the gesture, holding him close.

(they are nobody’s puppets, nobody’s pretense.)

There are no voyeurs watching; no cameras they need to entertain, save the one standing resolutely above.

Waiting between pause and play.

Toxins creep through Ouma’s vessels and veins; his last few breaths drawing out as Momota rubs comforting, silent circles onto Ouma’s back.

“I don’t want to do this either.” Momota sucks in a breath, unclean and drippy, and laughs harshly through the tired, sorrowful tears on his own face. “I wish I could’ve gotten to know you normally.”

(a hell like this doesn’t differentiate 

between the sinners and the saints.

in fact, the two seem to be 

mostly the same, anyway.)

“Me too,” Ouma murmurs, and thinks to himself that at least this is the last time he will experience loss. “Now go.”

They don’t have time anymore.

(there are no words after that.)

Momota’s touch lingers, hanging on, and slowly, he lets go. 

Ouma lies down and waits as Momota hobbles up the ladder.

And distantly, as the ceiling comes lower, Ouma finds himself reaching, arms held out, offering himself up to the falling night sky.

~~(to kaito, for eternity.)~~

-

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are appreciated. Thank you for reading!
> 
> For more oumota content/danganronpa stuff in general check out my tumblr & twitter (both also @khattikeri)


End file.
